An elbow-to-elbow crowd swarmed into the Bell Labs auditorium on the western border of Greenwich Village on June 30, 1948. Onstage before the guests and reporters stood bow-tied research director Ralph Bown-the small sign at his feet telling the story in a nutshell: "The TRANSISTOR." The Bell Labs folks would soon launch into full-scale demonstrations of the revolutionary device, invented the previous December. But Bown spoke first about how AT&T had engineered its achievement.

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